In the past, computing resources have been crowd-sourced for research purposes. One example is SETI@home, which is a public and Internet-based volunteer computing resource project that allows the public to donate computing resource to search for extra terrestrial life. Another example is Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), which was originally developed to support SETI@home, but became a generalized middleware system that supports volunteer grid computing. For instance, the public can donate computing resources with BOINC for use in distributed applications in areas such as mathematics, linguistics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, environmental science, and astrophysics, among others.